


Persephone (how lovely she is, all grown up)

by fightingtheblankpage



Series: lovely!verse [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Or not, a lot of talking about death, suggestion of mental illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-28
Updated: 2012-11-28
Packaged: 2017-11-19 18:43:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/576458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fightingtheblankpage/pseuds/fightingtheblankpage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Future!fic in which Lydia is something else entirely (wasn't she always?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Persephone (how lovely she is, all grown up)

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted from my LJ account.  
> Also, weird as fuck.

Most of the time, Lydia is **_fine_**. She’s better than all the rest of them, anyway – well, she’s always been better, but she’s better **_off_** , too – or at least she’s more of an actress. No difference, there. Not since a few years back, at least.

She watches them bend to the point of breaking, and wonders how is it that they don’t get twisted out of shape and instead spring back into the old, comfortable forms.

(She’s guilty of that, too. Isn’t the circle of Jackson’s arms just that? A place where she knows for sure she will fit, where she’s made herself at ease and safe.  He’s familiar and normal – ha, look at this, how far has your definition of normal stretched, Ms Martin! – and he’ll have her back, every time.)

And so Lydia makes herself comfortable in their lives, on the edge and in the middle of it all at the same time. She helps babysit Allison and Scott’s children and evades questions about when Jackson and she will have a pink little thing like these ones (“I’m still young,” she tells her parents and they don’t exactly approve. “I’m busy, busy, busy,” she singsongs to well-meaning ladies in the grocery shop. “And lose **_this_** figure?” she bats her eyelashes at Allison. Nice, convenient lines that someone else has written for her a long time ago.)

All of them – the **_pack_** , and she’s a part of it, too, she supposes – like to forget. They gloss over death and they like to close their eyes until it all goes away. They are moment of bravado followed by weeks of careful refitting themselves into the old frames. They are forgiveness and understanding. Lydia is remembering and knowledge.

Lydia would probably be more inclined to let it all slide into that nebulous realm of their teenaged years, if not for the constant reminder of those days when she slipped away from the world of living, wandered through the mist and darkness of burned-down houses. You can’t cross that particular threshold, reach inside and pull somebody out without a few things clinging.

They catch at her hair, twist themselves in-between the threads of her clothes, worm their way inside her dreams. Lydia thinks she smells of death (she asks Jackson about it one day, but he doesn’t understand; he rests his head on her arm, because that’s what he knows, and tells her, “You smell good, Lydia. What do you want me to say?”), and the perfume she’s used since she was young and innocent doesn’t smell like flowers but like rotting. Sometimes like ash, but she knows it’s not because of her, it’s because of Peter.

(Because you can’t cross that particular threshold, reach inside and pull somebody out without **_him_** clinging. Peter’s being subtle about it, because he understands this game – more so than she does? Probably, for now – but she held his life in her hands that haven’t been stained by blood and he poured his death into her. You don’t shake something like that off, not ever.

Sometimes she’s sure that Peter is the only one, not counting her – oh, but always counting her, she’s the one to be minded and watched and adored – who actually is capable of walking forward instead of spinning in circles.)

Lydia likes spending time with Scott, because he’s so perfectly oblivious – or he pretends, which is good enough, pretending and make-believe is what Lydia feeds on these days – and because he doesn’t drag death behind him. All of them do, even if they don’t know it. Maybe they are ghosts, those things she sees, but if they are, they are haunting nobody in particular, just curling their incorporeal fingers inside their chests and freezing their hearts.

She hates Derek – and so he’s the one to get her saccharine-sweet smile more often than the others (“What do you want, Lydia?” he asks in exasperation). There are so many of them trailing behind him, and he invites them in. On most days it’s Laura, the woman from her hallucinations – only smiling and laughing, not crying, because this way it hurts Derek more – but sometimes it’s Peter, too. It’s curious that for Derek his uncle is dead, and the walking, breathing man is someone else entirely. It’s oddly fitting. How many faces does Peter Hale really have?

 “What are you looking at?” Allison asks her sometimes, her voice laced with worry but soft – like she thinks she can scare Lydia away, like Lydia is **_fragile_**.  She’s not.

Lydia smiles at her, says nothing. This makes Allison uneasy. Not because she doesn’t know what’s wrong with Lydia – nothing, really – but because there is something wrong in general, and they all treasure the thought that the times of **_wrong_** are behind them. They want to believe they are safe, to the point where they are stumbling blindly.

Sometimes Lydia sits in an armchair, like a queen in her throne, and watches Victoria Argent stalk after Allison across the carpeted floor; the children watch with her, and so does the cat that Allison has adopted because it was ironic only to forget about the irony and remember to leave food in a red bowl. **_Children, animals, and madwomen_** , Lydia thinks and hums to herself.

On other occasions the room gets too crowded with people only she can see – this makes her sound crazy, and Lydia laughs silently, because she’s not – and the air is stuffy and cobwebbed, just like she imagines the air in coffins is. Lydia excuses herself, disentangles from Jackson’s arms and polite conversation, and goes to sit on the porch, breathe in and out, and in and out.

“You stole me away,” she says accusingly. She always knows when he’s near, and sure enough, Peter answers her from close by, his silhouette against a tree. His smirk, his eyes, the smell of ash that is his, even if people think it’s Derek’s.

“How could I steal the great Lydia Martin? You do what you want.”

It’s true, and she **_doesn’t_** smile. That’s how he knows she’s being honest. “They are stagnant,” she says, gesturing vaguely towards the house. Maybe they can hear her, maybe they don’t want to, maybe they don’t care. (They do. That’s their thing – **_caring_**. Funny how they weren’t there when she was running naked in the woods, going out of her mind and coming back to find it changed.) “I want change.”

“Then have it,” Peter says with a shrug of one arm. “Who’s stopping  you? **_What’s_** stopping you?”

Lydia thinks about Jackson. Then she thinks about Lydia, who is smart, beautiful, and **_immune_**. “Nothing,” she says. She doesn’t say ‘nobody’.

“Then go,” Peter says. “Or come, either way.”

Lydia tilts her head to the sky and names cities in her head, only to wipe them all away with another thought. She stands up, flicks her hair over her shoulder. Is it her who’s haunting him, or the other way around?

Peter doesn’t drag ghosts behind him.

“I want to lead,” Lydia says. She wants, wants, wants, restless since the day she realised she’s **_more_** than what Beacon Hills can contain, with an itch under her skin and a mind that she hides, and **_she’s reached and pulled a man from death_**. “You may follow,” she adds graciously.

Lydia is change and being reborn, and going forward.

Peter is pretty good at adapting, too.


End file.
